PrinceCon 33 Recap – York Dobyns

My 1st run was nominated for a collective “With Friends Like These” for the entire run. The hero hauling off and socking the party’s only cleric (for 8 pts nonlethal) for not healing his minor injuries before he put an unidentified ointment on them; the cleric not healing the hero because he was too busy enjoying being in melee in wolf-form; *another* hero telling the cleric “If he dies I’m going to kill you personally”; the cleric finally reverting to humanoid so he could do some healing and getting knocked out by attackers *because of* the nonlethal damage he’d taken earlier; the archer setting a new Princecon record for “friendly fire” damage by using Rapid Fire instead of Sharpshooter while firing into melee … the list just goes on and on.

My 2nd run discovered the Maze and did tolerably well for themselves although the Daglir cleric started gibbering when they found a corridor that intersected with a space they’d just mapped as containing a completely different room. They were careful, paranoid, and effective.

My 3rd run solved the Maze navigation puzzle and came back with a report about the Faerie/Beyonder battle several hours ahead of my planned schedule.

My 4th and final run came back with 7 out of a possible 10 militarily important magic items, heroically losing two characters in the process. (Actually I would say the “heroic” part was going *back* to the booby-trapped cabinet after their first attempt to unlock it set off 5 simultaneous Magical Traps in their faces: Room-filling Fireball; Chain Lightning in a 50% room-filling zigzag; Disintegrate (not Patterning, the 6th level Combat spell) and Flesh to Stone (Shaping) aimed at spaces the Chain Lightning didn’t catch; and a Cloudkill. They knew perfectly well there were at least 10 more traps left to trigger.)

So on a scale of 0 = Total Failure to 10=Overwhelming Success, I’d rate the players’ performance in my scenario at about an 8.